I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline
Simon Willison's Weblog3d agoEthicsSimon Willison highlights Chad Whitacre’s decision to leave tech and Open Source, framed not as a forum threat but as concrete action. Whitacre describes wanting to become “AI Amish” or “Internet Amish,” moving toward an offline, analog life closer to 1980 than 1780. A previous post about using Claude Code with Opus 4.5 shows how agentic AI felt intoxicating and unsettling enough to push him away from technological accelerationism.
Has the hunt for AI compute uncovered the next Cerebras?
TechCrunch AI5d agoHardwareTechCrunch reports that General Compute has raised a $15 million seed round at a $60 million post-money valuation to build an AI inference neocloud. The company is ordering $300 million of SambaNova SN50 chips, betting they can outperform GPUs and rival specialized chips for inference. The story frames inference speed, deployment flexibility, and lower power needs as key battlegrounds in AI infrastructure.
Vertu wants CEOs to run companies from an AI foldable starting at $6,880
TechCrunch AI5d agoHardwareVertu has introduced a luxury AI foldable phone starting at $6,880, aimed at executives and CEOs. Built on the open-source Hermes project, it combines AI-agent workflows, enterprise integrations, and ultra-premium finishes. The available summary positions it as a high-end mobile business control hub, but does not specify supported enterprise platforms, model providers, hardware specs, or concrete agent capabilities.
ESMFold2: The Bitter Lesson Is Coming for Proteins★ 74
Latent Space6d agoCommentaryLatent Space interviews Biohub’s Alex Rives about ESMFold2 and the broader ESM protein modeling stack. The discussion centers on datasets versus inductive bias, and whether protein biology is entering its own Bitter Lesson era. The key implication is that large-scale evolutionary sequence data and open models may become foundations for structure prediction, interaction modeling, and programmable biology.
New AI Infra Decacorns: Fireworks, Baseten, and OpenRouter★ 78
Latent Space6d agoBusinessAI infrastructure startups Fireworks and Baseten have reportedly reached massive valuations, reflecting intense investor interest in developer-focused inference and deployment platforms. OpenRouter, the popular LLM API aggregator, is also on a rapid growth trajectory. This funding wave highlights a major capital shift toward cost-effective, developer-friendly API and hosting solutions.
Millions of AI agents imperiled by critical vulnerability in open source package★ 78
Ars Technica AI7d agoIncidentArs Technica reports that Starlette, a Python package with about 325 million weekly downloads, has a critical vulnerability called BadHost. The flaw can let crafted Host headers confuse request.url.path, potentially bypassing middleware-based path authorization. AI infrastructure using FastAPI or Starlette, including vLLM, LiteLLM, MCP servers, LLM proxies, and agent frameworks, should upgrade Starlette and audit custom middleware.
Some ideas for what comes next, May 2026
Interconnects (Nathan L.)7d agoCommentaryNathan Lambert argues that 2026 AI progress is becoming higher-stakes, with model capabilities, work patterns, economics, and real-world risks all escalating. He says open models still lack a true Claude Code and Opus 4.5-style agent moment, and Gemini has no clear competitor to Claude Code or Codex yet. The essay also tracks Mythos, American open-model momentum, frontier-lab competition, and mounting intervention from governments and other power structures.